Saturday, March 26, 2016

Does poetry transcend its alphabet?

The text below is a spontaneous response to the above question, posed---and replied to by the All Ireland Poetry Slam account---on her Facebook, by Carrie Etter, an Illinois, Normal poet, and English professor at Bath University.

~

The very first subject introduced to a Foclo, the first grade of trainee Fili poet in the old Gaelic literary order that turned out forty generations of poets from 5-17C; was the Ogham alphabet, and the very specific tho highly convoluted tale of how it came to be invented by its creator, Fénius Farsaid.

We learn the tale in the Medieval poet-training manual, Auraicept na n-Éces,
Scholars Primer, a 12C compilation of four books:

... unique among
medieval grammatical works in that it represents the earliest vernacular
tradition in Europe. Its earliest ('canonical') parts date as far back
as the 7th century. In its present form, it contains much ancient
material relating to the Latin and Ogham alphabets, the nature of Old
Irish and Latin gender, comparison, and declension.

The first of them, The Book of Fénius Farsaid, tells the foundation myth of the Irish language, and goes into great detail about Ogham.His and the other Auraicept na n-Éces texts were decanted from the Book of Lecan, Book of Ballymote, and the text of the Trefhocul from the Book of Leinster, into English in 1917 by George Calder, under the title The Scholars Primer.'

Calder
labelled it Handbook of the Learned, but a more literal translation of
Auraicept na n-Éces - I was told by a senior Irish speaker
at a Poetry Ireland / Éigse Éireann event in Dublin - would be something along the lines of 'the system/working methods of poetry/knowledge'.

The
word Éces being one of the most ancient Gaelic words for
Knowledge/Poetry. Root of the name of Finn Eces/Finnegas ('bright knowledge') ,
the druid who taught a young Fionn mac Cumhaill.

Forty
generations of Gaelic poets began their seven-grade trek to becoming an
Ollamh 'poetry professor' ---and contender for the Ollamh Érenn 'poetry professor of Ireland' top spot occupied by such learned (and forgotten) figures as Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, poet to Maurice FitzGerald, 1st Earl of Desmond---
learning that Fenius created the Gaelic language on the plain of Shinar
in Babylon (modern day Iraq), three decades after Babel's collapse, when the 72 dialects
of humanity's shared languages were scattered, until being retrieved by
seventy-two (named) scholars, under the co-ordination of Fenius, who
spent a decade retrieving them.

From which he then
created, experimentally deciphered or back-engineered Hebrew, Greek,
Latin, and, finally, perfected all language into the Ogham form, and the
earliest recorded alphabet that the Gaelic language and its subsequent
1200 year literate Fili tradition found itself on.

We are told by the 7C author of the Book of Fenius in the Auraicept na n-Éces,
that the seventy-two named scholars who'd done the donkey work
collecting the scattered languages from which he created Hebrew, Greek
and Latin, asked that Fenius, 'select for them out of the many
languages, a language that no-one else should have but which might
belong to them alone. Wherefore on that account was invented for them
the (Gaelic) Selected Language (bérla tóbaide) with its (five)
superadditions.'

1 - Bearla na Feine, the language
or dialect of fenechas law. A high level language of the educated that
the system of entirely civil law was preserved in and used by Brehon
lawyers and Filidh poets for official business like law, ritual and
ceremony. Also the language in which Auraicept na n-Éces is written, as
well as Táin Bó Cúailnge.

3
- Bearla an Eaderscartha, the separative language or dialect; The
Language Parted among the trees. This is the famous Ogham, a language
used for encryption and memory lists. There are numerous Ogham tables in
the Book of Ballymote, all with different names and uses.

4
- Béarla Filidh - 'language of the poets'. The Secret Language of the
Poets, the 7C text states 'sometimes known as the 'Dark Speech' because
it obscures meaning through the use of kennings and metaphors. 'The
Poets used this language to converse among themselves, in tests and
initiations, in producing chants, invocations and satires, especially
when they wanted to reserve their meanings to the learned only.'

5
- Gnaithbhearla, the customary colloquial language and dialect of the
illiterate majority. The common language that serves everyone and what
became Old and Middle Irish, and eventually Modern Irish.

It
was a cipher language in which a skilled poet could communicate with
other poetry professors and poet-lawyers above the heads of everyone but
themselves. Where every letter was measured and elegant as sun-polished
blackthorn blossom, their text communicating a multiplicity of
meanings, the truest of which could be hidden in plain sight in words
carefully selected and wrought to form the abstruse stream of Béarla
Filidh, where every connection ---as John Minahane points out, quoting
from a Latin Grammarian, in his groundbreaking work of scholarship and
innovation: The Christian Druids: On the Filid Or Philosopher-poets of Ireland--- reveals 'knowledge of a thing (that) will die unless you know
its name.'